After weeks of fan outrage and campaigns against Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Games stepped in on Friday to announce they would allow mods to work in single-player mode on Grand Theft Auto V for PC.
Players voiced out their concerns and banded against the title publisher after it started sending cease-and-desist letters to developers of mod libraries like OpenIV, arguably because they enabled harassment in the online multiplayer version of the popular game.
Rockstar Games have gotten in touch with the creator of OpenIV and issued an update that restores it for players to remake use of it but limited to single-player mode. Other tools that did enable cheating in GTA Online will most likely stay down, according to the post by the studio.
Rockstar stuck to their word above Take-Two’s decisions
This whole scandal involving developers, publishers, modders, players, and even the White House started earlier this month when Take-Two Interactive sent a cease-and-desist letter to OpenIV developer ‘Good-NDS.’
The letter claimed the mod library enabled “malicious mods that allow harassment of players and interfered with the GTA Online experience for everybody.” Although OpenIV is focused on single-player modifications, Good-DNS recently admitted that some people were using the tools to cheat on multiplayer.
Take-Two’s crusade against GTA Online mod makers continued, with letters sent to the developers of Force Hax, Lexicon, and Menyoo over the next few days since the incident. These tools, like OpenIV, quickly shut down their services after receiving the notice.
However, back in 2015, the same year GTA V debuted on PC, Rockstar Games said that players using single-player mods for the game should not worry about being banned and that it was “unrealistic” to pursue all these tool makers just because they enabled cheating on the online version.
The studio reaffirmed its commitment to “reasonable fan creativity” in a post published on its support page, and clarified that it would allow single-player mods again but not any libraries that affect GTA Online. They even reached out to Good-NDS to help him bring OpenIV back online.
Fans have forced studios before to keep mods free
A similar high-profile controversy took place a couple of years ago when Bethesda and Valve partnered up to launch Steam Workshop as a program that allowed fans to sell their mod creations at whatever price they considered fair.
The story has two sides: the people who saw enormous potential for self-profit in the platform and those who advocated keeping mods free as they had been up to that point. Valve bet hard on the first group and lost after pressure from the second group ramped up to stop the initiative only a couple of days later.
The service was modified to remove the paid mods model, and representatives of the two companies infamously declared that they “didn’t know exactly” what they were doing. Bethesda announced Creation Club at E3, a similar program that has prompted more discontent and might suffer the same fate.
Source: Rockstar Games